


Frères Humains

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: Original Work
Genre: "We Shouldn't Be Doing This" Sex, Anal Sex, Bickering, Blasphemy, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Shame, Spanking, frenemies to lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:54:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23604133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: Wannabe Benedictine Luc and decidedly irreligious Anselm don't like each other much, but opposites do seem to attract. Perhaps a conflict of ideals could lead to something mutually pleasant for both of them.
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 12
Kudos: 20
Collections: Smut 4 Smut 2020





	Frères Humains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Harp_of_Gold](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harp_of_Gold/gifts).



Luc rises to the sound of a city waking in the gray dawn and the wan light that penetrates his dirty room, and washes across his desk, his chair, the little alter. Somewhere over the dark tangle of Paris roofs, the sun is rising gold. It will strike the half-finished towers of Our Lady of Paris and make the Seine glimmer, and in this golden moment, the bells of St. Jacques ring loud and all the bells of all the other churches of all the parishes and convents and monasteries join them, turning the whole sky of Paris into one divine cacophony. 

Luc, for his part, would sleep another hour, rather than wake to enjoy this glorious dawn and the jangling toll of all the city’s bells. He has been trying, these past few weeks, to keep the Hours as a monk would, though his tonsure is only that of a student. But he has plans for what he will do after university. Paris is a wonderful dream, he thinks, but you cannot live on wonderful dreams forever. Soon they become too difficult to sustain in the sharp, ripe breeze of the greatest city in Christendom and one must go feed them with good country air. Maybe he’ll take proper holy orders after all is said and done, join the Benedictines. His mother, he knows, wouldn’t be able to stop talking about it, not for years. She’d be my-son-the-Benedictining at every Sunday’s market back in Bourges, right up along with her my-son-the-lawyering and my-son-the-successful-merchanting. She’s a widow and she loves her children and does right by them. It would do to make her proud and give her something to gossip about for years and years to come. 

But more than his mother’s happiness, Luc wishes for his own. And he can find his own happiness in the gloriousness of learning and devotion to the Seven Liberal Arts he dresses and he takes himself up and out of bed in order to attend his lesson this morning. Chapel, then rhetoric. All in the service of Heaven and knowledge. And, well, if he sees Anselm today, so much the better. 

*** 

It’s after the last lecture he attends, nearing evening, that he sees Anselm for the first time today, his scholar’s robe flapping as he hoots in laughter with Jean-from-Chartres (who, though he’s been in Paris and in the same college and Nation as him for years, Luc still confuses with Jean-from-Troyes). 

“And I said to him, ‘well, if Ovid doesn’t do it for you, why don’t we play at boys and eagles like we did when we were choristers? You’ll be Ganymede, and I’ll be the eagle.” Jean-from-Chartres guffaws. 

“What did he say?” 

“Oh, he liked the idea, and I liked it better still, so off we went and Jean, if you’ve never done it with your brethren, you really must. Heaps better than tavern girls, and you can even talk poetry after.” 

Luc coughs ostentatiously to let them know he’s there. But he still feels a shiver up his spine, something rather like a tongue of fire, and he tries to think of cold things or of God. 

“Oh,” says Anselm. “Didn’t see you there. Hullo, Luc. The Fox after Vespers?’ 

This last part’s directed at Jean-from-Chartres. 

“I’m meeting the divine Christine tonight, so can’t. Maybe two nights on?” Jean says. “Anyhow, got to run before my tutor birches me like a schoolboy. _Vivat academia,_ and all that!” 

He runs off, down the narrow street, and Anselm shakes his head. 

“What am I going to do with him, Luc?” he asks. “He’s going to become a Franciscan at this rate.” 

Luc laughs, but he still gives Anselm a punch to the shoulder. Anselm laughs. 

“What? It’s true! He likes wine and women, and he’s got no direction in life. Ergo, he’ll take proper vows, ergo he will become a Franciscan.” 

Luc’s known Anselm since they both came to the University, since Anselm heckled the masters and dragged him into taverns despite all his protests. Where Luc is simple, plain, and ordinary, albeit perhaps more ambitious than he lets on, Anselm is anything but. He’s a poet, knows his Latin and writes it beautiful and filthy, composes perfect rhyming verse in Occitan and French, and sings in a clear, light voice as well as any jongleur. At Mass, his clear tenor floats in the choir, perfect and lovely and never quite blending with the others. It’s a soloist’s voice, not a priest’s, and a voice just as easily put to the vile and fleshy as it is to the words of God. 

Perhaps, Luc thinks sometimes, his friend is the Devil himself, sent in a beautiful form to tempt him. Because Anselm is both fine-featured and secretive. He says he’s from Paris, but Luc knows half the people of Paris who say they were born there are from elsewhere, from every dusty little village or dull cathedral town with a bad harvest. They come in their multitudes to Paris, and there they disappear. But with his green eyes and golden hair, his songs and his poems and his running about from tavern to tavern, it’s hard to think of Anselm disappearing into the city’s nothingness. 

He’d be prettier without the scholar’s tonsure, Luc thinks as he looks at Anselm now, but even with it, Anselm is bright-eyed and merry, and looks less a scholar than a wandering jongleur thrust haphazardly into clerical guise. As it is, he can’t see Anselm staying in orders long. And that’s just as well, because with every mention of his unchaste exploits, with every mischievous glance Anselm throws Luc’s way, Luc just wants to kiss him more and more, even as he wants to bite off his head for his blasphemous remarks. 

Anselm throws an arm over Luc’s shoulder as he stares down the narrow street, past signs and people leaning out from upper-story windows. The light is soft, and the city is alive with the noise of life and the music of the ever-present church bells from every belfry in Paris. They ought to be heading to Mass or dinner, but Anselm guides Luc away from their college instead. 

“We’re going to the tavern,” he says. “Better have fun before we’re dead in a ditch somewhere.” 

*** 

When he finally kisses Anselm hard on the lips, he’s surprisingly sober. 

They’ve been arguing as usual over wine and food, Mass long forgotten, and Anselm makes some mention of seeing the world. 

“Fuck the Church,” he says, full of wine and belligerence. “I’ll share my songs with the world and take what I need and they can hang me if they like for it, but at least I’ll have lived. Unlike you, future, saintly monk, drunk like all our hypocrite instructors.” 

“I’ll be a monk,” Luc slurs. His face is flushed with wine, but he can feel the fog dispersing in his body. He's always sobered up quickly. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, and I’ll do it. You’re here to tempt me. From the Devil.” 

He waves his hand in the direction of Anselm’s face. 

“But you’re the tempted one.” 

Anselm looks like a cat who’s gotten into the cream. 

“So what if I am? We’re all tempted. I’ll just think on Christ’s wounds until I’m not.” 

He laughs at that. 

“Don’t tell me you’re lusting for Christ,” Anselm says around giggles. “I’ll write a poem about it if you don’t say otherwise. A poem about a saintly sodomite who only wants to-” 

And Luc kisses him. It’s the only thing to do, even there in the crowded tavern where everyone could see but most will turn their eyes aside. Anselm’s lips are warm, flavored with bad wine and cheap cuts of roast meat, but it’s not too bad. Luc’s wanted this. He’ll say a hundred thousand prayers in penance, wear a hair shirt and everything, if only to have this one bright moment. 

Anselm’s the one to break it off, sharply gasping. 

“Didn’t know you had it in you,” he said at last. “Not so holy after all, are we?” 

Luc tosses a glance around the tavern, flushed and furious at the nonchalance. “We’ll continue this later outside,” he mumbles. 

They do. They don’t do much more than kiss and fumble in a dark alleyway, then walk their way back to the college, but it’s a start to something bigger, and Luc thrills at it, even as he sinks to his knees to pray. 

*** 

“You’re an insufferable holy twat,” Anselm whispers some nights later when they stagger back to his lodgings in a flair of passion and argumentation over some minor doctrinal detail brought up two days before in a lecture. “I’d like to fuck the smugness out of you, and the love of learning into you, ‘till all you’ll be fit to be when you join the join the Benedictines is their whore who sings Latin songs at them with your filthiest voice in the best pronunciation. Spreading yourself for all of Cluny.” 

Anselm says it in Latin, as if that’ll make it sound any less crass, but there’s a lilt to his words that makes it all sound like he might like to set Luc’s defilement into poetry given the chance. Frissons of anticipation run up Luc’s spine. He’s ready for this. 

In a motion he never thought he’d make, Luc reaches up and grasps Anselm by the chin, gives him a kiss quite hard enough to bruise and bites down blasphemies as he tastes Anselm’s tongue once again. Then he bites Anselm’s lower lip and pulls away, leaving Anselm to squawk in surprise. It’s unexpectedly attractive. 

“I’m already sinning,” he says softly as they clamber up the stairs to Anselm’s room in the college. His clothing feels too hot; his face is flushed. “So scourge me for it. Make me bleed and ask the Father for forgiveness.” 

Anselm pushes open the door, laughing. 

“I can do that, Saint Luc,” he says, and tosses him down on the bed. 

The bed groans under him, ropes creaking and blanket sliding, and Anselm is already shimmying out of his robes, and fiddling with his smallclothes. Luc pulls off his robe as well, folds it neatly, and makes for his underthings, placing the little heap beside his bed. It looks fastidious compared to Anselm’s heap of clothing. 

“I’m ready,” he whispers, and his mouth is dry with the understanding of sin. 

Anselm nods, and in a moment, he’s been thrown to the bed again, this time face first into the rough and musty blanket. His arse is pulled up, exposed to the chill air, and Anselm gives it an experimental pat, and then a more resounding slap. This, Luc hadn’t expected, but he’s not sure he dislikes it. 

“You said you wanted punishment,” Anselm says behind him, his voice laced with questioning. 

“I did, so get on with it,” Luc says, just as Anselm brings his hand down harder. 

Luc’s arse burns as if inflamed with hellfire by the second blow, though Anselm doesn’t seem to be showing any sign of stopping. He rains down blows with a practiced hand, falling across the plump, exposed flesh of Luc’s ass. The air is cold across the firey pain on his skin, everything like one bright line of flame within him. There’s something molten in his core, Luc thinks, enflaming all his body as still the blows rain down. The heat’s in his cock too, and it burns and throbs against the rough cloth of the bed, stiffening, already dripping with precome, and Luc moans. He should be praying, he thinks, but there’s something wild and pagan in his mind. He moans again and tries to remember the Ave Maria. It comes out in a wail as his mind races past the Virgin and towards the Pater Noster, and he’s only begun to mutter this second prayer when he hears Anselm’s voice in his ear, amused and thick with lust. 

“Much as I would love to believe you are calling me savior, I thought the purpose of this was both to chastise and damn you.” 

“Then I need more than a hand,” Luc says. “I need something in me.” 

Anselm laughs. 

“That can be arranged.” 

His hands ghost over Luc’s arse, spreading it, touching, gently exposing him more than he has ever been before. Anselm explores Luc with his fingers for some time, not particularly gently, and a few times Luc gasps, half in shock and half in arousal at the intruding search within him. Then, almost as Luc has relaxed into the pain of his throbbing cock and the feeling of the crooking digits, Anselm spits on Luc’s exposed hole. 

The moisture is a shock, but a shock that goes straight to Luc’s leaking, dripping cock, sensation firing Luc’s nerves, and then Anselm’s cock in him, up him, the feeling of a body pressed against him and pulling out. 

It’s a sudden burst of feeling, the thickness of Anselm’s heft within him, and Anselm stays there for a moment, his sweat-slick chest pressed against Luc, and then he’s let him go, his hands wandering to Luc’s hips to pull him flush to his groin. And then he pulls out, only to slam back in, to fuck into Luc as though Luc is barely there. It’s rough and wild and so exhilerating that Luc can scarcely feel more than a few small prickles of shame in all this sensation, his face buried in the musty bed, joyful, shameful tears leaking from his eyes. But when Anselm finally begins to stroke him, Luc begins to pray again. 

He prays the Ave Maria the whole of the rest of the time, till the Latin fades to an incoherent babble as Anselm finds places within Luc that Luc didn’t know existed. He prays it as Anselm rakes his nails down Luc’s back in a glorious rush of pleasurable pain, and he prays it softly when he finally comes with a cry halfway through a prayer, baptizing Anselm’s hand in spend, a white rush that leaves him feeling filthy and exhausted and more alive than he has ever felt before. 

Soon after that, Anselm shudders, his thrusts ending with a great and joyous shout. He slumps against Luc, and suddenly they’re both together, exhausted to the bed, and filthy with spend, scarcely able to move. Luc feels as though he’s been rung out, rung clean, and he finds himself crying happy, furious tears. He hasn’t felt so alive in ages. He’ll never feel quite this alive again. 

Anselm turns to look at him, sweaty and just as beatific. 

“That,” he says, “was something.” 

“It was, wasn’t it?” Luc replies, still panting. 

They lie silent for awhile in the darkness of the room, listening to the soft sounds of humanity as all the city around them makes its way towards sleep. 

“You’ll be a charmer with the Benedictines,” Anselm murmurs softly into Luc’s ear, “lips like sin, and an arse like Eve’s apple, and a mind like Saint Augustine. But haven’t you ever thought about being a holy friar and wandering? We’d be quite the pair- the Franciscan and the jongleur, wandering through the world and singing our sinners’ songs.” 

“I’m not going to become a friar,” Luc says grumpily. “Just because I fucked you once doesn’t mean I’m going to go wandering about when I’m clearly better suited for a cloistered order.” 

Anselm presses a kiss to his shoulder. 

“You say that now, but you never know. Things could change. Haven’t you ever wanted to see the world?” 

Luc has never thought of it. He’s thought of songs and abbeys and holy orders, but never exploration, never what he could do without the limits of walls. For the first time ever, in this dark room smelling of lust and joy, he considers it anew. 

**Author's Note:**

> So this is set at the University of Paris around the late 13th century. I apologize for any glaring historical errors here, as well as for minor ones. I've had some difficulty accessing sources recently for the reasons you might imagine. Anselm is somewhat based on François Villon, but probably more based on the annoying dude in a 9 AM university elective class who shows up late, hungover and not giving a shit be it a Monday or a Wednesday. Cluny, which Luc keeps talking about, was one of the great French monasteries of the high medieval period, which had a network of affiliated abbeys across a good bit of Europe. 
> 
> Helpful sources for this fic included Life in the Medieval University by Robert S. Rait, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure, and Punishment in Medieval Culture by Robert Mills, and Rituals For the Dead: Religion and Community in the Medieval University of Paris by William J. Courtenay, as well as various and assorted helpful websites. 
> 
> Title is from François Villon, of course.


End file.
